Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for International Relations and Welsh Language – in the Senedd at 2:49 pm on 18 September 2019.
I think it's important that we recognise that we do have an ambition to create a million speakers in Wales and that actually part of that means that we also have to be a part of that transformation project that's going on. At the moment, the number of Welsh speakers in the Welsh Government is around 22 per cent, which is reflective of the demographic population, but there has been an increase since 2015.
What is clear is that we, as a Welsh Government, have a responsibility to provide a bilingual service for the public and, in order to do that, we need to have the staff who are able to provide that. At the same time, of course, we don't want the inability to speak Welsh to be a barrier to people to apply to work in the Welsh Government. And, obviously, what we can do and what we do do is to give comprehensive support to people to enable them to undertake Welsh lessons once they've been appointed. I visited Nant Gwrtheyrn last week. There were people from the Welsh Government, from the Welsh Assembly, taking part in those lessons. So, there are ample opportunities for people who come into the organisation to learn Welsh.